The first FabLab in Istanbul is being launched within Kadir Has, a private university, in partnership with Istanbul Development Agency, a government fund destined to projects that “stimulate local potential, foster regional development and ensure their sustainability”. Driven by neoliberal growth objectives and integration into world markets, Istanbul, the emergent financial capital of the region, presents itself as an ambiguous setting for initiating the “next industrial revolution”. This contradiction is traceable in the initial application documents for funding, where the buzzwords of “creative class”, “smart cities”, “technological innovation”, and “competitive university” have been influential narratives for the positive outcome. To what extent the initiators of the project adhere to this vision, and which alternative discourses and motivations underlie their engagements? The evolution of the space and its network from August 2013 to May 2014 will be chronicled, including interviews with key individuals and the analysis of their documentation. Three main axes of investigation will be pursued; (a) understanding the role of FabLabiST in design and technology education within the university; (b) surveying the strategies of open access and inclusion of various actors in its ecosystem (designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, artisans…); and (c) assessing the material production realised in the workshop and the economic value cycles they participate. This analysis aims to question the viability and relevance of synthesising divergent interests in the making and functioning of FabLabiST, hence providing the maker community with a reflexive account of the challenges encountered when starting up a shared machine shop. Overall, this testimony intends to contribute to a broader debate: how do we introduce practices of peer production and commoning into preexisting institutions?

Waiting for the Anthropocene: certainty and doubt in times of ‘biocrisis’ and ‘peak capitalism’

Never mind radical cults waiting for the Apocalypse or radical politics waiting for the Revolution. All of a sudden, geology —perhaps the most conservative of all natural sciences— has proposed the most radical temporal break ever conceived. We have entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, marked by the impact of a single species, Humans, over the chemical and organic composition of the planet. In times when alternative cosmologies are (re)emerging to challenge anthropocentrism, we are realising that we have irreversibly left our trace —that there is indeed no Nature other than the one we have (dis)figured. In these times of radical uncertainty, statistics —hardly the most prophetic branch of mathematics— can easily be mistaken for oracles counting down how much time and fuel and species are left, or how high temperatures and seas and GDP can rise. Projections, predictions and probabilities dominate the scientific discourse by measuring, quantifying and calculating the incommensurability of ‘biocrisis’ —the crisis of all life. This paper will present some key numbers about our climate predicament and discuss the implications of their cultural and political appropriations. More specifically, the most controversial claims about the consequences of these numbers are about the fate of the economy —from the “Limits to Growth” forty years ago, to today’s “Carbon Bubble”, various contradictions are signalling an inevitable “Exit from Capitalism”. In other words: in times of impending ‘peak capitalism’, can politics of possibility ever find a voice in the language of scientific certainty?